The rule was inspired by the spirit of camaraderie in hair salons, said State Senator Bill Cunningham, one of the chief sponsors of the amendment. For some women, those salons are a safe space, where they can sit among other women, drop their guard and confide about life as their hair is braided or colored, or their nails trimmed and painted....

So, it's a great place for government to plant informants.

The final version of the law, which was signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner in August, does not require salon workers to act on their suspicions, but helps them to recognize warning signs and provides them with resources to pass on to victims so they can get help — such as safe houses or hotlines — get restraining orders or get access to legal professionals....

The curriculum emphasizes the importance of letting clients take the lead in disclosing details about their personal lives....

It's interesting that the state doesn't require salon workers to report anyone to the police or to social services. It's not like the way psychotherapists must submit to compulsion. But the state does require the training, repeated training, and it is willing to deprive hairdressers of their license — their livelihood — if they don't comply.

And do I detect condescension in the NYT's attitude toward the sort of women who find "camaraderie" in hair salons?

“I’d been wandering past a barbershop in Brook Street around the corner from our salon in North Audley Street, and I saw the barber drying the front of a man’s hair with a brush and a hand-held dryer,” she told W magazine in 2012. “And this image — of the barber with the dryer — flashed through my mind and I thought, ‘Why not for women?’”....

“I picked up a spiky plastic hairbrush and a hand dryer and started rolling a wet section of her hair around the brush, followed by warm air from the hand dryer held in my left hand,” she wrote in a memoir, “In Paris We Sang” (2013). “The more sections of wet hair I rolled over the brush, the easier it became, and soon part of [the customer's] curly hair looked smooth, as if it had been brushed through from a set. Exciting!”

One day by chance, Lady Clare Rendlesham, the editor of the British edition of Vogue, dropped by the salon and, witnessing a blow-dry in progress, stopped dead in her tracks. “What are you doing, Rose?” Mrs. Evansky recalled her shouting....

I couldn't figure out the name of the "finding jackie" blogger, but I got obsessed with finding a book I read long ago that I thought might have that title. Searching for a book on your shelves might be as passé as setting your hair in rollers and sitting under a dome dryer, but I discovered I am still able to do it....

In Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach tells the tale of a West Coast utopia that secedes from a nation consumed by capitalistic greed. According to Callenbach’s vision, Northern California joins Washington and Oregon in seceding from the United States, essentially writing off Los Angeles as a car-obsessed bubble of heathens. While maybe the car-obsessed thing hasn’t changed, the prevailing attitude of young Los Angelenos has...

Fast-forward to 2016, and much like the book prophesied, we have a state that is directly at odds with the rest of the nation....

If you take California out of the popular vote equation, then Trump wins the rest of the country by 1.4 million votes. And if California voted like every other Democratic state — where Clinton averaged 53.5% wins — Clinton and Trump end up in a virtual popular vote tie.

[Team member Carlton] Djam told police that their sex was fully consensual. He produced three video clips taken on the morning in question that showed the woman was "lucid, alert, somewhat playful and fully conscious; she does not appear to be objecting to anything at this time," according to the police report. This satisfied the police and no charges were filed....

[But] the university has its own process for investigating sexual misconduct that is separate from the police. According to the Education Department, Title IX—a federal statute mandating equality between the sexes in public education—requires universities to adjudicate sexual misconduct internally.... [T]he Office for Civil Rights—the agency that ensures Title IX compliance—has instructed universities to use a lower standard of proof. OCR guidance also discourages administrators from allowing cross-examination, one of the most vital tools a defendant has to prove his or her innocent.

As a result of Minnesota's Title IX proceeding, 10 players were suspended.

Strange to look at that old face and visualize the young man I knew. This blows my mind. "David Friedman" is such a common name that it took me a while — I've been reading news stories about him for days — even to consider checking to see where he went to law school.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Mr. Friedman, whose outspoken views stand in stark contrast to decades of American policy toward Israel, did not wait long on Thursday to signal his intention to upend the American approach. In a statement from the Trump transition team announcing his nomination, he said he looked forward to doing the job “from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Through decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, the embassy has been in Tel Aviv, as the State Department insists that the status of Jerusalem — which both Israel and the Palestinians see as their rightful capital — can be determined only through negotiations as part of an overall peace deal.

What do I remember of the young David Friedman? It's hard to trust memory enough to want to say anything at all, but I believe I remember a young man who was strong and intense and happy to be different from the mass of NYU law students.

December 16, 2016

It was a personal decision because my wife's family name, LeFavour, was dying out. While I have a brother who has two sons, she and her sister were the last of an old line, one that stretches back to colonial times; her ancestors fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. We debated giving our children, Penn and Harriet, one of those double-barreled, hinged-at-the-middle last names: Garner-LeFavour. But it sounded ungainly, affected, and like the name of a forgotten Canadian trade bill.

At the time, our decision didn't feel like an act of defiance or cultural daring. It felt like us. We were young and living in a tiny (600-square-foot) apartment on Jane Street in Manhattan's West Village when we had our children....

When Trump first made noise about running for President, I just used my tag for "The Apprentice" and resisted making a tag even for his name. Now, I've got a bunch of Trump tags, and I'm trying to keep them from getting as ridiculously numerous as my Obama tags. I think I need to do a good culling of my Obama tags — maybe get rid of anything that didn't collect at least 4 posts.

Anyway, speaking of Trump derangement syndrome, Cassidy starts out:

Over the past few weeks, a number of anguished friends and acquaintances, and even some strangers, have got in touch with me to ask what they might do to oppose Donald Trump. Being a fellow sufferer from OATS—Obsessing About Trump Syndrome—my first instinct has been to tell people to get off social media and take a long walk. It won’t do anybody much good, except possibly Trump, if large numbers of people who voted against him send themselves mad by constantly reading about him, cursing him, and recirculating his latest outrages.

Well, that's pretty sensible. OATS is a little silly, but it does allow one to say "I'm feeling my OATS."

To feel ones oats means "to be lively; to feel self-important" — according to the Oxford English Dictionary. P.T. Barnum used it in his 1869 memoir "Struggles & Triumphs":

As I grew older my settled aversion to manual labor, farm or other kind, was manifest in various ways.... In despair of doing better with me, my father concluded to make a merchant of me..... Of course, I "felt my oats." It was condescension on my part to talk with boys who did out-door work. I stood behind the counter with a pen over my ear, was polite to the ladies, and was wonderfully active in waiting upon customers. We ketp a cash, credit and barter store, and I drove sharp bargains with women who brought butter, eggs, beeswax and feathers to exchange for dry goods, and with men who wanted to trade oats, corn, buckwheat, axe-helves, hats, and other commodities for tenpenny nails, molasses, or New England rum.

The art of the deal.

Of course, Trump has been compared to P.T. Barnum and he has embraced the comparison. From back in January:

Yesterday, on "Meet the Press," Donald Trump was presented with a list of characters he'd been compared to: "some people are calling you the Music Man of this race. Kim Kardashian. Biff, from Back to the Future. George Costanza. P.T. Barnum. What's - any of those do you consider a compliment?" Trump immediately said "P.T. Barnum."

"After that, I knew what to expect and could photograph the birds as they dove.... With remarkable eyesight, the gannets follow the dolphins before diving in a free fall from a hundred feet high, piercing the surface of the water headfirst at a speed of 50 miles an hour. They dive as deep as 30 feet to get their fill of sardines before returning to the surface. This type of sardine is the best to photograph because, when confronted by predators, they don’t move. Their instinct is to swim down as a group, but the dolphins keep them at the surface."

For last month’s column on whether nutritious food is more expensive than junky food, I looked at the costs involved in growing broccoli and corn. One estimate from the University of California at Davis estimates the costs of growing broccoli at about $5,000 per acre, whereas corn is about $700. Factor in that corn delivers 15 million calories per acre to broccoli’s 2-ish million, and the cost to grow broccoli (25 cents per 100 calories) is 50 times larger than corn (half a cent per hundred calories). And that’s just the difference on the farm. After harvest, that broccoli needs to be refrigerated and transported to where it’s going before it spoils. Broccoli has nutrients that corn doesn’t, of course, so it’s a good thing that we eat some. But an all-vegetable, or mostly vegetable, diet is prohibitively expensive for most people.

The land issue is directly related. When you can grow many more calories per acre, you need fewer acres. The closer we get to maxing out our farmland, the more important that calculation becomes.....

The inescapable reality is that the inherent costs involved in growing, storing and shipping vegetables often make them a luxury food. The backbone of a diet good for both people and planet is whole grains and legumes: oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils.

So is eat your vegetables terrible advice? I looked into the comments section over there for the answer I expected and found it as the second "most liked" one:

I think this is a valuable discussion when it comes to food security, aka making sure people aren't starving to death.... But if you're talking about the average American and those around the world with an increasingly American/western diet, I think it's a disservice to our health and economy to think that we can continue with grains and cereals as a nutritional backbone....

It's one thing to feed the billions of people in the world. Give them their oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils....

... but we Americans expect better things — a well-balanced, nutritious, healthful, tasty, and virtuous diet. And please don't bother us with notions of virtue that demand that we live like those people out there somewhere in the world where it's a struggle to pack in enough calories to get by.

It's an art exhibit by an art collective called Everything Is Terrible! The NYT reports:

The collective’s obsession with Jerry Maguire, which was released on VHS in 1997, the same year that DVD players began to arrive in American homes, is a product of the ubiquity of the VHS version of the film, as well as its status as a somewhat useless object.

The film “sort of called to us,” Mr. Maier said. “We kept seeing it over and over again.” (Wikipedia claims that itis [sic] the best-selling, non-Walt Disney VHS film ever. But according to a 1998 press release from Blockbuster, the film “Titanic” broke records in video home sales, surpassing several Disney filns [sic] as well as “Jerry Maguire.” )

Filns. It's some kind of commentary on where we are now, that on the day — yesterday — that was the 50th anniversary of the death of Walt Disney, there's no article about him in the NYT, just a mention of his name, lifted from Wikipedia, in an article about an art installation about a 20-year-old Tom Cruise movie, alongside the sad typo "filns."

Here's a little video conveying the off-handed art of Everything Is Terrible! Of course, it's terrible. They'd be lying if it were not terrible. Everything is terrible:

The highlight of the video comes at 9 seconds, when the walking pile of "Jerry Maguire" videotapes passes by the Scientology building. The NYT article does not mention Scientology or allude to Tom Cruise's religious nonconformism, which may have been a reason for making him the butt of an art joke:

The Jerry Maguire Video Store at iam8bit Gallery will be a perfect re-creation of a video rental store circa 1996, but instead of carrying thousands of porn quadrilogies and action movie knockoffs, this store will carry only Jerry Maguire on VHS. Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste, and existence as a whole. The Jerrys are a beautiful thing.

And this is only the beginning. At the Jerry Maguire Video Store, EIT! will be unveiling plans for the enormous, permanent pyramid in the desert where all the world’s Jerrys will live until the end of time....

See the satire of religion?

Disney's deathiversary did get the briefest notation in the NYT, which publishes the AP column "Today in History."

In 1966, movie producer Walt Disney died in Los Angeles at age 65.

Here's the obit the NYT published at the bottom of its front page 50 years ago:

"Since winning the presidency, Trump has earned four more Four-Pinocchio ratings, and his staff has earned one, as well. Unfortunately, we see little indication that this pattern will change during his presidency."

There has never been a serial exaggerator in recent American politics like the president-elect. He not only consistently makes false claims but also repeats them, even though they have been proven wrong. He always insists he is right, no matter how little evidence he has for his claim or how easily his statement is debunked.

"He always insists he is right, no matter how little evidence he has for his claim or how easily his statement is debunked." Can we get a fact checker on that statement of Kessler's? It can be tagged false if there is even one example of Trump admitting that he was wrong about something! You'd think Kessler would be more careful with a dangerous word like "always" — speaking of things "easily... debunked."

How about all the times celebrities have appeared with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Did you call them all props and baubles for a narcissist to gloat over?

Waldman goes on to talk about the "fascist undertone" of West's art. (She doesn't use the word "dark," by the way. That racially questionable adjective only appears in the headline.)

Mussolini’s favorite thinkers exalted the heroic, and curiously amoral, promise of man hurtling toward perfection; West speaks in similarly bombastic terms when he declares that, as a musician, “I can do whatever I want to do. … If I’m gonna take a stage and like, open up a motherfucking mountain I can do that.”... West and Trump’s dynamic—the artist and the strongman—evokes a traditional symbiosis between aestheticism and fascism. In the visually ravishing films of Leni Riefenstahl, the crisp goose-stepping of smartly uniformed troops, the propulsive fervor of futurism, we’ve seen politics married to the pursuit of the beautiful before.

Ironically, it's Waldman who is marrying ideas and images. If she's aware of how propaganda like Riefenstahl's films work, is she circumspect about what she herself is doing? It's not too aesthetically appealing, so there's little chance that it will sway large crowds, but it is, in its own tawdry way, propaganda.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

So it's come to this. Slate writers assuming that Black entertainers are useful stooges to The Man.

Nothing racist at all about that assumption.

It's the Clarence Thomas treatment. A black person is given less room to have opinions of his own.

Slate's Will Oremus examines the story, propounded by the NYT, that John Podesta relied on advice from an IT guy who wrote "This is a legitimate email" but says he'd made a "typo" and had meant "This is an illegitimate email." Oremus asks the obvious question: Did you also typo "a" for "an"?

The IT guy, Charles Delavan, told Podesta to change his password and to set up two-factor authentication, but he gave him a correct link to Google's website. Podesta reacted by clicking on the link in the original nonlegitimate email, which is a mistake that anyone using email should know about.

Asked about the a/an discrepancy, Delavan told me the Times had the wording wrong. Delavan had actually meant to type that it was “not a legitimate email,” but mistakenly omitted the word not. Are you sure, I asked? “Yes,” he said. I asked why, if Delavan knew the email was not legitimate, he still directed Podesta to change his password.... Delavan said he recommended the password change “out of an abundance of caution,” even though he knew the request was a scam.

There would have been no problem if Podesta hadn't gone to the bad link. Delavan's "abundance of caution" failed to take 2 steps of caution that could have helped save Podesta from his own personal witlessness. Delavan should have had that "not" and should have said don't click the link in that email.

Actually, I don't think Podesta was personally involved in any of this. Delavan interacted with Podesta's chief of staff, Sara Latham. Podesta looks like a fool, and there's this lame effort to shift the blame to Delavan. How about paying more attention to Latham? Are women just invisible?

"John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both,” the staffer said. "It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP."

His chief of staff, Sara Latham, wrote to another Podesta aide, Milia Fischer: "The gmail one is REAL Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!”...

So it was Milia Fischer who failed to use the correct Google link but went back into the original phishing email? How many layers of unsophistication did they have over there at the Clinton campaign?

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.

The story is about the idiocy of falling for phishing! How is that "hard to see coming"? And what's the point of tracing it? Just never fall for it and the problem is solved, wherever the hell it came from. The Russians don't deserve special credit for devious genius. The Clinton campaign deserves to be lambasted for its shocking stupidity. And these are people who wanted to be trusted with the nuclear codes and who relied on the argument that Donald Trump is a dangerous ignoramus.

"I found myself in an unanticipated situation, and had conflicting emotions. In his absence, was I qualified for this task? Would this displease Bob Dylan, whom I would never desire to displease? But, having committed myself and weighing everything, I chose to sing 'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,' a song I have loved since I was a teen-ager, and a favorite of my late husband...."

"The best of the Republican establishment would have been filing lawsuits and infusing every public statement with a clear pronouncement that Donald Trump was the real winner. And they would have started on the morning of Nov. 9, using the rhetoric of patriotism and courage."

Lithwick and Cohen offer as proof of their assertion the way the GOP fought in Florida in the 2000 election. But that had absolutely nothing with denying the fundamental constitutional structure that is the Electoral College.

"As Monday’s Electoral College vote approaches, Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail," they say. But what arguments could possibly be made? They say:

Impassioned citizens have been pleading with electors to vote against Mr. Trump; law professors...

Law professors!

... have argued that winner-take-all laws for electoral votes are unconstitutional; a small group, the Hamilton Electors, is attempting to free electors to vote their consciences; and a new theory has arisen that there is legal precedent for courts to give the election to Mrs. Clinton based on Russian interference.

"... and the black man fights those prejudices with equal openness and fervor, using every constitutional device available to him.... The rest of the world in general and Britain in particular are prone to point an angrily critical finger at American intolerance, forgetting that in its short history as a nation it has granted to its Negro citizens more opportunities for advancement and betterment, per capita, than any other nation in the world with an indigent Negro population."

That meeting is today. But just yesterday, one tech guy — Bill Gates — who's already talked with Trump, said:

"A lot of his message has been about ... where he sees things not as good as he'd like.... But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that.... I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics... [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump's] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation."

You've got to scroll way in to get to the speakers. Politico has some text, describing election night (at 1:16:17 in the video):

“So it began with phony exit polls. And I got a call from my daughter at about 5 o’clock, and she was called by people in their business,” Trump began, referring to his daughter, Ivanka. “And her husband, Jared, great guy, he was called. Then they called me and they said: ‘I’m sorry, Dad. It looks really bad. Looks really, really bad.’” Trump recalled asking what the problem was and conceded that he “really assumed I lost” because, despite his constant rant against “phony” polls, he thought they had some credibility. “So I sort of thought I lost, and I was OK with that,” Trump admitted. “I wouldn’t say great. In fact, I called my vice president and I said, ‘It’s not looking good.'"

“So I go and see my wife. I say, ‘Baby, I’ll tell you what, we’re not gonna win tonight because the polls have come out and’ — you know, I always used to believe in those exit polls. I don’t believe in them anymore. ’It’s just looking bad. But, you know what, I’m OK with it because of the fact that I couldn’t have worked any harder... You can’t do any worse than that. I mean, I just couldn’t have done it. And if I lose, I lose. And you know what? If I lose, I lose and I’m gonna have a nice, easy life. We can all relax, together, right?’” ...

“So now the polls just closed, and they start announcing numbers,” Trump said. “And I say, ‘Oh, this is gonna be embarrassing.’ I’m trying to figure out what am I gonna do. And I have this ballroom that’s not that big because I didn’t know if I was gonna win or lose.” But what he did know is that if he was going to lose, “I didn’t want a big ballroom.” Trump reenacted the brisk concession he would have delivered, in which he would have thanked his supporters and said good night....

From the comments: "Were you unable to talk to her? I imagine that all of your questions would’ve have been answered or at least a simple conversation would’ve revealed a few things. I think you may have answered your own question about informative vs. exploitive."

I just stumbled into that old post today. "If Trump wins..." Well, Trump did win. And it was one thing to watch that video last June, but how about now? Did you laugh? Did Al Franken laugh — Al Franken, who says Trump never laughs?

"... I saw this book from the 1800s and it was velvet-covered with brass and everything. I looked at all these people’s photos, and they look so real and their outfits were incredible and they weren’t smiling. People, you know the paparazzi, always come up to me, ‘Why you not smiling?’ and I think, not smiling makes me smile. When you see paintings in an old castle, people are not smiling because it just wouldn’t look as cool.'"

AND: In Trump's case, maybe he's not laughing because not to laugh fits his theme They're laughing at us...

ALSO: Here's a great example of Hillary relying on a laughing-it-all-off approach to dealing with a challenge — and Trump staying aggressively unjovial:

"... the reality is that the character’s current iteration is that of a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee high boots –the epitome of a 'pin-up' girl."

Said the petition to reconsider the decision by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on October 21, 2016, to make Wonder Woman the new Honorary Ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls.

The United Nations has ended a campaign featuring Wonder Woman as an ambassador for women and girls, two months after the announcement was met with protests and a petition complaining that the fictional superhero was an inappropriate choice to represent female empowerment....

Jeffrey Brez, a spokesman for the U.N., disputed that the campaign had ended early or as a result of the protest, as some reports have suggested, citing other honorary ambassadorships with much shorter tenures.

So what is the correct feminist position on Wonder Woman? I've never liked her, but I just don't give a damn about super-heroes. She's scantily clad and has an idealized physique, but that's true of male super-heroes as well. It's a good idea, within super-herodom, to have female characters. Is that inspiring from a feminist perspective? Ms. Magazine has always liked the fictional lady. She was on the cover of the first issue:

I remember seeing that first issue bandied about in 1972 and dismissing it out of hand as old-fashioned and middle class. We had advanced beyond the boundaries of gender, I thought, so this was retrograde — embarrassing.

Wonder Woman's family of Amazons on Paradise Island, her band of college girls in America, and her efforts to save individual women are all welcome examples of women working together and caring about each other's welfare. The idea of such cooperation may not seem particularly revolutionary to the male reader. Men are routinely depicted as working well together, but women know how rare and therefore exhilarating the idea of sisterhood really is.... Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women's culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream: strength and self-reliance for women; sisterhood and mutual support among women; peacefulness and esteem for human life; a diminishment both of "masculine" aggression and of the belief that violence is the only way of solving conflicts.

Wonder Woman has a band of American college girls? Seriously, I do not know the story of Wonder Woman. It really doesn't sound U.N.-appropriate.

"In a moment in history where purity is used as a horrible goal by jihadists and right-wing fear mongers alike, I think it’s a cool line to keep in mind, reminding us that impurity is our own, and our strength."

From a NYT article about "La Marseillaise." This is, in France, The Year of the Marseillaise, and there was a big conference about it, which much cogitation about the meaning of the words, which were written in 1792, during the French Revolution.

You can read the lyrics in French and English here. The "impure blood" part is:

The English philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was declared an honorary citizen of France in 1791 in acknowledgement of his sympathies for the ideals of the French Revolution, was not enamoured of La Marseillaise. Contrasting its qualities with the "beauty" and "simplicity" of "God Save the King", he wrote in 1796:

The War whoop of anarchy, the Marseillais Hymn, is to my ear, I must confess, independently of all moral association, a most dismal, flat, and unpleasing ditty: and to any ear it is at any rate a long winded and complicated one. In the instance of a melody so mischievous in its application, it is a fortunate incident, if, in itself, it should be doomed neither in point of universality, nor permanence, to gain equal hold on the affections of the people.

"For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in the White House. 'There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a great thing,' Franken said. 'You go through a process of internalizing it.' In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks: 'A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive] Again.' How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility, whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump."

I was looking to see what else Mark Leibovich has written. He inserted himself into that Al Franken article — I kept thinking of an Onion headline — right into the paragraph about Franken's headache. That seemed unusually egoistic for a NYT writer.

In saying he will nominate Mr. Tillerson, the president-elect is dismissing bipartisan concerns the globe-trotting leader of an energy giant has a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia.

A statement from Mr. Trump’s transition office early Tuesday brought to an end his public and chaotic deliberations over the nation’s top diplomat — a process that at times veered from rewarding Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most loyal supporters, to musing about whether Mitt Romney, one of his most vicious critics, might be forgiven.

What was chaotic? That's a word they've been trying to stick on the transition from the beginning. A search in the NYT archive for trump transition chaos got 43 hits!

The Times forefronts this statement from John McCain:

“Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying,” Mr. McCain said on Fox News.

Is that the language of diplomacy? If Trump had said "Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer," he'd have been regarded as a lout who doesn't have any idea how to talk like a President. But here's McCain saying that anyone who doesn't use that kind of crude, brutal language is a "liar." You're a liar if you don't baldly insult the world leaders you're trying to deal with? Yet somehow Trump is portrayed as the off-the-rails hothead and McCain is the wise, elder statesman.

I'm just teasing, saying "somehow." I know how, and you do too. McCain got defeated in his bid for President. If he, a Republican, were running for President or had been elected President, his words would be presented as evidence — part of a swell of evidence — of his unfitness. Safely defeated, McCain is the quotable statesman — quotable because he usefully disparages the Republican who did get elected.

Now, I'm at the end of the article, and I see what I suppose is meant to support the assertion that the search for a secretary of state has been "chaotic." Trump looked first to Rudy Giuliani and then moved to Mitt Romney, and then Kellyanne Conway spoke openly about Trump supporters who opposed Romney. Thereafter:

Mr. Tillerson emerged as a contender on the strong recommendations of James A. Baker III, the secretary of state under President George Bush, and Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, according to a person briefed on the process.

Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon argued for Tillerson, then Trump met with him for 2+ hours on Saturday and made the decision. Is that "chaotic"? I can't help feeling that if Hillary Clinton were picking a Secretary of State through a process like that it would have been presented as methodical, careful, and beautifully indicative of a brilliantly competent presidency to come.

"... and I don’t think leaders from other countries one way or the other, whether it’s for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or any other candidate — I think it’s best left to Americans to make those decisions."

Said Scott Walker, opining on the news that the Russians preferred Donald Trump and got involved in showing the public a bunch of embarrassing email messages that various Democrats sent to each other.

Is this a good analogy? And did the leader of Scotland endorse Hillary? The answer to the second question is easy. It's yes:

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon broke with international protocol when she wrote days before the election that she hoped Clinton would win.

But is it a good analogy? Sturgeon openly endorsed Hillary, but Putin's preference for Trump is merely a matter of guesswork. What Putin may have done about his preference is also a matter of guesswork, and it is connected to the illegal hacking into computers and the revealing of private communications that — through no action of his — contained statements that reflected badly on Hillary Clinton.

So the analogy doesn't match up on all points, but that's what's provocative about it. To the extent Sturgeon did something similar to what Putin is accused of, how bad is it? To the extent that it's different, is what Sturgeon did okay? And was it awful for Walker to compare these 2 things that are not entirely the same?

Jenni Dye, research director for liberal group One Wisconsin Now, called Walker’s comparing the two scenarios “simply jaw-dropping.” “Declaring one of these actions was not dramatically more serious than the other is either incredibly naive or the most disturbing example yet of Gov. Walker’s blind partisanship,” Dye said.

Key word: dramatically. I'm tired of the continual drama. I'd prefer to calmly compare the 2 things in the analogy. If you want me to be upset that somebody is a "blind partisan," don't sound like one yourself.

Now, let's get down to the work of checking to see whether the NYT really presents evidence to justify that headline. I'm reading every word of the rather long article but will only give you the actual evidence offered for the proposition that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win. There's a lot of material in the article that is not about that at all. I'm excluding that, which is padding if the headline is the correct headline. Go to the link if you want to see what it is.

The first relevant material comes in the 16th paragraph: The DNC's servers and John Podesta's email account were hacked and a lot of damaging and embarrassing material was released onto the internet.

Next:

American intelligence officials believe that Russia also penetrated databases housing Republican National Committee data, but chose to release documents only on the Democrats. The committee has denied that it was hacked.

So here's the crucial disputed question of fact: Were the GOP servers also hacked? We're not told what evidence supports the belief that the GOP servers were also hacked, but the GOP says they were not. Yet some "intelligence officials believe" it was. Why? Where's the "swell of evidence" you were going to tell me about?

Even if that fact were nailed down, there would still be more leaps needed to get to the conclusion. First: Was there any embarrassing material? What? If I knew what, I could begin to think about the next question: Why would embarrassing material be withheld? All I can see from the supposed "swell of evidence" here is an assumption that if the DNC was hacked, the GOP committee was also hacked, and that if bad material was found in the DNC server, bad material would also be found in the GOP server, and since we only saw the DNC material, there must have been a conscious decision — by whom?! — to leak only the DNC things and that decision must have been made to help Trump win. That's not evidence itself, only inference based on evidence.

Finally, there are a few paragraphs about why "Putin and the Russian government" might be thought to prefer a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency. Trump and Putin have given each other some compliments.

Squirreled away at the end of the article is the admission that people at the FBI are skeptical about the conclusion. An unnamed "senior American law enforcement official" told the NYT that "the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions" and that "any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media." The NYT observes that the FBI holds itself to "higher standards of proof," since its work is geared toward prosecuting criminal cases in court, but: "The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments."

I'm staring at that headline again. You said there was a "swell of evidence." Shouldn't that satisfy the FBI's higher standard rather than the good-enough-for-the-CIA standard? I think I see the reason for the different standards. The CIA is concerned about what might happen in the future. But why are we trusting them in an FBI/CIA disagreement about what happened in the past?

The very end of the NYT article is about the FBI investigating "numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank." This investigation began in the summer and seems to have played out by September and October — for reasons that are "are not entirely clear" and that the FBI won't talk about.

Speaking of embarrassing material... that headline, with that content... in the NYT. So awful.

I'm distracted into reading about the word "swell" in my dictionary (the OED). One usually reads of a swell of the sea or of music or emotion. "Fenc'd no where from the least Surge or Swell of the Water," wrote Daniel Dafoe. "And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind," wrote Tennyson. "Of all the actors who flourished in my time... Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy," wrote Charles Lamb.

Another is the high amplification, especially in the early morning: "The mosques would put their speakers right up near the homes of Jewish people and wake them up." That quote is from Motti Yogev, a member of parliament from the pro-settler Jewish Home party, who observes that in the old days there was only unamplified singing from the minarets (or knocking on doors): If it's okay to use modern equipment in the call to prayer, why not use phone apps and alarm clocks?

To be clear, these are not pajama-style garments, nor trousers that simply borrow the loose fit and drape of sleepwear. Ostensibly, these are pajamas, promoted for both men and women....

What does that even mean?

Let me think...

... so even though the word "pajama" has been used over the years to refer to clothes that are not pajamas in the sense of being intended as sleepwear, these new clothes they want you to wear when you're out on the street and being seen by nonbedmates are in fact pajamas?

All of these garments have luxurious fabrics, elaborate patterns, saturated colors, comfortable silhouettes. They are, in fact, quite handsome. But they look precisely like what they, in fact, are: Pajamas.

You have fabric, cut in shapes and sewn together. What makes it "in fact" pajamas once you've eliminated the idea that this is something to wear only in and near bed? Are we getting philosophical or is the quick route out of this conundrum simply to recognize that fashion demands suffering? If that outfit looks comfortable, it cannot be fashion. Lines must be drawn, and the people who look comfortable must be excluded.

Now, let's get back to the subject of how everything is about Donald Trump and the Trump derangement syndrome raging within the soul of the lady with the dog who forgot to suppress the fact that she lives in a gated community.

“The notice was drafted by an employee, who was immediately terminated for her actions,” the statement said. “Additionally an outside third party further altered the breakdown without our knowledge and posted it on social media. Cadillac unequivocally did not authorize this notice or anything like it, and we apologize to Cadillac for the ex-employee’s actions.”

But quite aside from whether advertisers use the word "alt-right" in their casting calls, I think they are going for this look. I was watching the Packers game with Meade last night, and as the various car and beer and fast-food restaurant ads came on, I found myself quipping "Does this haircut make me look like a Nazi?"

And it's only looks that matter in these ads. No one will be expressing any political opinions in a Cadillac ad. And if they were, the opinions would be scripted, not the actual opinions of the actors. What does it mean to do a casting call asking for "REAL Alt-Right believers/thinkers"? It can only mean that you look like that sort of real person, not that you really are one.

Let me take you to the heart — the skull — of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize speech. He says that when he got the "surprising news" that he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he started thinking about William Shakespeare....

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well...

That's just me, quoting a Bob Dylan song. That's not from the speech. Here's the speech, the part I want to show you:

I would reckon [Shakespeare] thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”...

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

That bit about the human skull got me thinking about something in "My Dinner with Andre," a movie in which 2 men talk mostly about theater. At one point, Andre Gregory is talking about directing the Euripides play "The Bacchae":

Pentheus has been killed by his mother [Agave] and the Furies, and they pull the tree back, and they tie him to the tree, and fling him into the air, and he flies through space and he's killed, and they rip him to shreds and, I guess, cut off his head. My impulse was that the thing to do was to get a head from the New Haven morgue and pass it around the audience. Now, I wanted Agave to bring on a real head and that this head should be passed around the audience so that somehow people realized that this stuff was real, see, that it was real stuff. Now, the actress playing Agave absolutely refused to do it.

And the songwriter Bob Dylan refused to show up and receive the prize. There are always questions about life’s mundane matters.

Am I recording in the right studio? ≈ Is this speech meant for reading out loud in a Swedish ceremonial hall?

"We never thought of it as racist – the man in blackface was my grandfather. My parents recently moved out of their house, and it was only when I presented the idea of hanging the poster in our own home to my husband that he looked at me in horror and said we could never do that. I’m ashamed I’ve been so willing to dissociate the family history in this object from the history of racism. Part of me was sad and conflicted about it never seeing the light of day again, but I’ve decided to donate it to the Jim Crow Museum where it can be contextualized, and people can learn from it."

The Jim Crow Museum is the largest publicly accessible collection of segregation and racist artifacts in the United States. These objects are used to teach tolerance and promote social justice. The Museum is free and open to the public; therefore, the Museum is largely dependent on donations-financial and in-kind-to enhance its work.

Speaking of contextualizing racist objects reminds me of this scene in "Ghost World," which we were just watching the other day:

"You're not supposed to sit on them because you're not supposed to expose your genitalia to them... I, however, was in a wetsuit for this whole shoot so - oh my God, they were so good for butt-itching. One rock that I was butt-scratching on ended up coming loose. It was a giant boulder and it rolled down this mountain and almost killed our sound guy."

She had to apologize — not for almost killing a guy or thinking it was funny to almost kill a guy, but for calling attention to the religious significance of the rocks and then going for the humor of an ass-scratching fiasco.

Marcia Ogasawara, from Hawaii, said she didn't find it funny, adding: "If she left the part of it being sacred out, then I wouldn't care; but knowing native Hawaiians built that for some significance and her talking like it's not a big deal, it's very disappointing."

What blinded Lawrence to the problem with her anecdote was the belief that if you are self-deprecating, there's some kind of immunity. Or so she tells it. I think it's more that if you've been given enough reason to think you are adorably lovable and you take yourself lightly, eschewing arrogance, everyone will receive what you have to give in the spirit you intended.

Redshirt senior Inky Ajanaku, who led the Cardinal (25-7) with 20 kills and 11 blocks and was named the tournament’s MVP, said her team was a “little flabbergasted” after the first two sets. But after she gave her youthful but talented teammates a pep talk at intermission, she could sense they were not about to give up.

“I looked in everybody’s eyes and I saw they were ready,” Ajanaku said. “They were ready to be there all night and they were ready to fight.”

AND: Isn't it strange that volleyball is the sport with the most violent lingo? Kills. Where's my trigger warning?

"Clinton’s supporters believe they are living in a world that is a repeat of 1930s Germany, with Trump playing the part of Adolf Hitler. See this reaction for a typical example. Meanwhile, the other half of the country believes we elected a highly-capable populist who will 'drain the swamp' and bring a business approach to government along with greater prosperity. So how do you know which reality is the real one? The fast answer is that you can’t know. As I said, the human brain did not evolve to understand reality. But just for fun and education, I’ll tell you the best way dig down to the next layer of truth: Look for the Cognitive Dissonance trigger...."

"For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.'"

A tall, tousled computer scientist, a university archivist and a curious New York retiree converged upon a warehouse off Cottage Grove Road on Madison’s East Side one day last August.

Scott Mindock, David Null and Doris Cross had never met, but they were about to share a Howard Carter moment, thanks to the hoarding instincts of the late Leon Varjian, the jokester who tapped Madison’s funny bone in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Carter was the Egyptologist who opened the Tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. When he got the first peek inside, he was asked “Can you see anything?” Struggling for words, all he could say was “Yes, wonderful things.”

I saw this yesterday and averted my eyes. As a diligent — dylangent — blogger of all things Dylan, I feel obliged to provide you with coverage of the Nobel Prize ceremony, which took place on a day when my writing about Bob Dylan consisted of 2 quotes from 60s-era Harvard-Square snobs insulting Bob for playing croquet badly and having green teeth.

But he sent Patti in his stead — Patti with her lifelong embodiment of Punk, Patti to sing one of the oldest, most serioso Bob Dylan songs for the throng in white tie. She chokes up around the 2-minute point, and you might think she's just so moved by the profundity of the words, but the truth is she's forgotten what comes after "I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’." The next line is "I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’," but she sings "I saw the babe that was left bleedin'" and then for the line after that — which should be "I saw a white ladder all covered with water" — she begins "I saw the babe...." Another babe!

When I heard this the first time, I believed she — just like a woman — was reacting to the suffering of babies. But Bob only put one baby into the song — "a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it" — and that baby had already been sung about, back before the black branch with blood that kept drippin’. Oh, Patti, you are in verse 2 of a song with 5 verses full of particular characters and images. Is it the poet or the clown who dies in the gutter? Does the white man give you a rainbow or walk a black dog? What about the pony? Where is that pony?

Is Bob Dylan watching this YouTube and feeling glad it ain't me, babe, bleedin' babe, cryin' in the alley, dyin' in the gutter, with ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’?